Paul Charney told the story of preparing for his 1986 bar mitzvah, (“Duran Duran had just split up”) when his rabbi asked him if he believed in God.
“In my head I was thinking just say yes, just say yes. I broke out into a kid sweat,” said Charney, founder of the San Francisco comedy troupe Killing My Lobster, to a crowd of approximately 300 people at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco.
On the third night of Chanukah, every folding chair was filled with hipsters in variations of holiday black prepared for an evening of old-fashioned Jewish storytelling with a twist.
New York-based Heeb magazine teamed up with San Francisco’s Porch Light storytelling series to present “The Martyrs and Miracles Show” with five Jews, one wannabe and a supporting cast of musicians who performed in the warm, candy-cane pink light of the hall’s old wooden stage in the Castro.
For every monthly event, Porch Light founders Beth Lisick and Arline Klatte pick a storytelling theme and choose six performers who each get eight minutes to tell their shtick.
“This is the first time we’ve had a show with a religious overtone,” said Lisick before the show.
Judging by a show of hands, about 40 percent in attendance were Porch Light first-timers — most likely happy Jewish Heeb fans, out to celebrate the magazine’s premier appearance in the Bay Area. Heeb’s second largest readership is in San Francisco.
“This is not a f—-ing Jewish outreach program. This is art with first-rate artists,” explained Josh Neuman, Heeb’s editor-in-chief and publisher, who was “tickled silly” with the turnout.
He said Heeb is about exploring contradictions in Judaism — the secular and profane, the modern and historical. He’d been waiting for the right opportunity to “articulate in a communal setting” in San Francisco what his quarterly magazine has been doing, and found that opportunity in Porch Light.
“Hi. I’m Emily and I’m Jewish,” began Emily Morse, a filmmaker, director and actress who grew up in a predominantly Jewish Detroit suburb.
The first storyteller of the night decided years ago “I don’t do Jews,” and went on a hunt for her “first WASP boyfriend.” He took her to her first Christmas, where everyone wore “reindeer sweaters.”
“In a Jewish family there is so much food and nothing to drink, and in this room there were only nuts with the nutcracker thingy.”
Morse’s quest to fit in and be useful landed her in a room with “a massive pile of presents.” She endured paper cuts and wrapping-tape misgivings before she was finally fed — and discovered, to her disappointment, “a huge glistening ham.”
The moral of her story?
“I still don’t do Jews, but I definitely don’t do Christmas.”
In a spoken-word style, novelist Peter Plate told of his grandmother’s journey from “the greatest ghetto” in Odessa, Russia, (where she survived a “legendary pogrom” with “dead bodies head-high”) to a new “ghetto” in California and, finally, to the “ghetto in the sky.”
Audience performer Elizheva Hurvich got the crowd laughing and clapping with her story about a Whole Foods employee re-labeling a bottle of Christmas mead with a Rosh Hashanah label.
Vocalist/composer Jewlia Eisenberg, who grew up in a Brooklyn “black-Jewish-Stalinist commune,” recounted how a miracle prevented her from becoming an ethnomusicologist when she was planting barley in Bulgaria.
And DJ Polywog — in black leather pants, thick vines of tattoos climbing both arms and a blonde bob — told how her fascination with Jewish culture came to a head when Rabbi Yosef Langer (“He had a menorah on his Harley!”) denied her a hug.
“I love it when I find a rule I think is really cool.”
Before the crowd disbursed to an after-party at Café du Nord, Charney — grinning from under a vintage San Diego Padres baseball cap — addressed the room, “Isn’t Jewish storytelling awesome?”